Nightwork: Stories (3 page)

The last Jack was particular even to the way he ate. “Remember?” I ask her. I used to pester him about the melon rinds he left scooped smooth as boat keels, or the ears of corn with each pocket emptied yet unbroken and erect. How did anyone eat corn, I wanted to know, so that the cobs, stacked four- and five high on the plate, looked like something you could eat again?

“Oh, Jack,” Mother says. “His problem was he didn’t drink enough.”

“And his handwriting,” I say, and Mother scowls at me. She does not remember his lists of what he left for us to do. The dashing caps on his capitals or the evenness of his hand, word by word, line by line, on unlined paper. Only business, that Jack said.

The white in his hair—why, white paint, what else? And the red in his eyes, just red string. I believed him.

Mother says, “He only looked like some big deal.”

Under the kitchen table, I licked this Jack’s plump shoes, both. But neither tasted of anything I knew of.

“Look,” Mother says, and I can see her looking out from the crack in the door she leaves open when she pees. “You can always lock the door.”

My mother soaping her throat is what I hear, and soaping the ledge along her throat where she sometimes lays her hand when she is quiet.

“This is the plan,” she is saying. “Someone handsome is on his way here. His name is John,” my mother says, “but we know what that means.”

Black hair, I think, buzzed to a shadow at the back of the neck.

“This new Jack is different,” Mother says. “This new Jack has some style. Not like the last Jack with his surf and turf or turf and surf—whatever the shit, on your first night out. Here’s style for you, the last Jack’s idea: snifters of candy on every table. What a dunce!” Mother says, handing me her puff and powder, showing me her back.

I white out trails of water leaking from her snarled hair.

“I know about a lot of things,” Mother is saying, “but I do not know about men. Only this,” Mother says, stepping from the damp and powder-traced impressions of her feet. “This last Jack had no taste. This last,” Mother says, “I dressed him. Remember the suits?”

I remember coats, gray and odorless, square-cut and severe—the same, the same, shrilling on the closet rod.

“The cashmere sweaters?” Mother says. “In case he read a book.”

I remember hats—not stiff, not Grandfather’s hats, those upside-down coffins, but soft hats slumped at ease.

“Jack and his affable act,” Mother says. “But he was handsome,” Mother says. “I got carried away.”

All those ties my mother bought him—so many, a ladderwork contraption looped with ties, one over
another, sometimes slipping loose, falling in a faint behind the shoe racks. I have found these ties in the back of Jack’s closet and used a broom handle on them.

“Do you have to go out?” I ask Mother, and I follow her from room to room.

“I have to think,” Mother says, putting on her model’s coat, looking through her closet. Dressing for this new Jack as she did for all the others takes up lots of time, she says. The purses packed like eggs, the mixed-up shoes all hooked in sacks.

“Better to be small,” Mother says, taking out her slimming skirt. “Men take care of small women.”

But I may grow to be as big as Mother. I have her hair, and what I think were once her eyebrows.

“And the rest?”

Mother smiles at me. “Takes two,” she says.

I do not have my mother’s face—that much I know. I do not have the face my mother wears for all her Jacks, smooth and lit-up and amazed. Beautiful, the Jacks all say, and she is. I have seen women stop to look at her, my mother, and sometimes even ask. Have they seen her before? Have they seen this face in magazines, the same face my mother pulls at now, pinching up her eyelids, saying, “I may be too old for this business.”

“So why do you want to go?” I ask, watching the light wash over Mother’s laid-out clothes. Slip, panties, pearls, and dress, all the whites turned old-teeth yellow.

“What do you think?” Mother asks, pouting at the mirror.

I say, “I think you shouldn’t wear that dress. And don’t let this John know you have any money.”

Mother says, “Okay, little mother. What should I wear?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Just stay buttoned. And don’t tell this guy about me,” I say.

Mother says, “I’m not listening to you.”

“Remember the last Jack?” I ask.

“Oh that bastard,” she says, “but what do you think he was doing to me?” She is penciling eyebrows, arched and alert. “Yes?” Mother asks. “I’m waiting,” and she rubs off an eyebrow in the harsh way she did when this last Jack was here and she was always washing, saying she smelled bad—and Mother did not smell bad.

Night after night, dinner on the porch at the glass-topped table, me between the two of them, this last Jack and Mother, I sometimes got the smell of her confused with food and snatched her wound-up lipstick once and bit her red in half. I remember.

Under the glass-topped table, I saw my mother’s long brown legs crossed at the ankles, thucking her heel in and out of her shoe.

“ ‘Do you think everything you do is so pretty?’ this last Jack said.”

I ask, “What did he mean by that?”

“Who cares?” Mother says. “He made me feel
dirty, that Jack.” She licks a paintbrush to a point and outlines her mouth. Mother says, “Oh God, I have no taste in men. Do you know what that means?”

I think.

I think I do—hearing how it was when this last Jack came home. The plak-plak of his briefcase, open and shut; no other word for days.

Mother says, “He was not nice, that Jack.”

I say, “So why are you going out?”

“Because I am,” Mother says.

And she is standing now, my mother, in the spatter of her dress—back, forth, back, forth—a sweater, a purse, an umbrella in case. “Besides, I am hungry,” Mother says, “for surf and turf—who cares? I won’t be paying for this stupid meal, and if the man has any manners, I won’t know the price.”

“Oh, don’t go,” I say.

She is watching from her window the man’s approach across the lawn. “You can wave from here,” Mother says in the voice she uses with the new Jacks, and I do.

I wave and wave, even though she is not looking. I wave at my mother muscling her own weight under this Jack’s arm. I cannot hear what they are saying; it is quiet in this town.

But the neighbors must notice my mother and her Jack. Either side of us and across the street, the Dunphies, the Smiths, Barbara Claffey down the street, must press to windows startled as by birds that swoop and mate so queerly close. I sometimes draw the blinds to them—but not to Mother. I am ready for Mother and her sudden turning to see if I am watching her,
to see if I am paying attention to how she stands, tottering in her shoes, ankles gagged and tense and helpless—and Mother is not helpless. My mother is brave, I think, and her upturned face is shining. I see this, and see them both, willful lovers, tilted away from the house, leaning hard into the night.

WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN DOING?

S
he was out of practice, and he wanted practice, so they started kissing each other, and they called it practicing, this kissing that occurred to him. In the middle of rooms, she obliged, in her bedroom, his bedroom, a kissing done standing, her hands on his shoulders, his not quite on her waist, heads tilted, mouths open. “Like this?” the boy asked, and the mother said, “Yes,” but kept her tongue to herself, and only laughed sometimes at the suddenness of his—his tongue that in its darting seemed not his. The way he drew back to laugh and to ask, “Isn’t that right?” made her think he didn’t like that part, not quite, not the way she liked that part and how it was he tasted—always he tasted of a warm sweet water, and of a breath so clean, she wondered how she must have tasted, so that she shut her mouth to him and steered him by the shoulders
to his desk or to his bed and said, “Okay, you know now.” She said, “Someday you will make a girl happy,” and her saying so made the boy smile, for this was something the boy wanted to do—he was in training, she knew, in readiness for making a girl happy.

He said, “I am going to have a maid when I grow up.” They were in the kitchen then, the boy and the mother, rinsing dishes. “Lucky you,” she said, and they went on washing dishes.

“I am going to have three houses,” the boy said. This was later, another time. “I don’t know where,” the boy said. “But the places will be important.” The mother was approving and asked what she always asked: “May I visit?”

“If Dad is not there,” the boy answered, and later, another time—for these ideas, she found, came to him as suddenly as kissing—he said, “I will have houses for you next to all of my houses.”

Sometimes the boy thought of dancing. He put on his music and called out to the mother, “Come dance,” and she went to the boy because she knew the music—she told him so. “This was our music,” the mother said, “before you were born.” She taught the boy how to stroll and Cakewalk and guide a girl under the arch of his arm. She told him, “The girls love boys who love to dance,” and “The girls love boys who ask.” When she told the boy these things, she put her arms around his neck and swayed, pulling on his slow, sleepy body, his big feet hardly moving, his hands at his sides—his boneless, dimpled child hands cupped and open and cool to her touch. She pressed to find his knuckles, to
measure, by feeling the length of his fingers, which, she believed, was a measure of the man to be, or was it feet? She could never remember—but his fingers were short and his thumbnail, when she looked, was rucked and milky. “Bad boy,” she said, and she put his thumb in her mouth and tongued the whorled thumb pad. “Okay,” the boy said, “I get the idea,” and he pulled away from her embrace and started his own dance, a made-up dance, hop-skipping to his room. “I want to play now,” the boy called. “And can you get me something to eat?”

She was in the bathroom, and he was at the door. Mornings, evenings. “Do you mind?” she answered. “Are you deaf?” she asked, pressing a wet washcloth over her breasts and turning away from the cold huff of air in the door’s opening. “Just checking,” the boy said—and the mother smiled when she shouted, “I have no privacy here!”

Room to room, stacked straight, tight, divisions so thin she could hear the boy at night butting against the wall between her bedroom and his. She thought of horses knocking in their stalls and wondered was it the boy’s foot or out-thrown arm, and would he, in some half sleep, come to her, shuffling on his big feet, saying, “I brought my own pillow.” She was always awake when he came to her and remembering what not to forget, so that to have this boy next to her, the sidelong press of him on his back, arms crossed over his chest, a sealed package to poke and wonder at, was a way of remembering, and she thought. This cannot be bad—and she sometimes spent the night with him.

“You didn’t move!” was what the boy said, finding
his mother when he did not expect to find her in the morning still beside him, but in his own bed and explaining, “You take up all the room,” or saying, “Here is room,” and smoothing the place beside her.

Awake like this and in bed together, there was often nothing left to say, and so they kissed. They kissed as boys and mothers kiss: she, dry smacking everywhere fast—cheek, nose, chin, neck—and he, giddy in the heat of her kissing, kissing back slow and wet and opening his shirt to let her scratch. “Here,” he said, “and here,” pointing to low places prickling at her touch, pointing lower.

“You!” the mother said, and roused herself from his bed. “You must be hungry,” she said.

In this way, the day began, or else it happened he was gone, and she was in his bed “Because the light was better,” she said, and the pillows, plumped so near the window, stayed cool. And if the phone rang, very early, as it did when he was gone, she was nearer to it, ready to answer in a wide-awake voice, knowing even before he spoke, it was the boy calling. He was as suddenly moved to call her as he was to kiss her, and with nothing more on his mind than “What have you been doing, what are you doing now?”

“Braiding corn tassels,” the mother said. “Gouging eyes in the potatoes.”

The boy, at home again, said, “I am going to have lots of children.”

The boy said, “I will never get divorced.”

The boy was locking himself in the bathroom then. He was saying, “I want privacy.” He was saying, “Look at me”—goose-stepping toward the mother, naked as
the day he was born, and asking, “Who am I?” The boy’s game—“Who am I now?”

“A soldier,” the mother said.

“A bad man,” the mother said.

But she could never guess him right.

The boy changed even as the mother answered, coming at her in some goofy bump and grind. She looked, and then she did not look, and swiped at his soft belly, and swiped again to keep him back, and when he kept on jiggling toward her, she took hold of his shoulders until he stood still and away from her, but not so far she could not touch him. She pressed her thumbs against his pink squint-eyed nipples, and the boy said, “You are my mother.”

The mother said, “So?”

“One kiss.”

And the boy gave it to her, fast, before he moved away from where the mother was standing, in the middle of a room she did not recognize, in a body that was suddenly not quite hers.

GOOD NIGHT,
SWEETHEART

I
date an old man, a man so old, I am afraid to see what he is like under his clothes. I am afraid of his old mouth and his old breath. His eyes, when he looks at me, are watery and sad, even when he is laughing, and he is often laughing, just behind me, at a joke I have made. This old man seems to like me. He takes me to dinner; he lets me talk and talk, like boys used to do. My mouth waters with the pleasure of it, telling stories whole, being heard; I order dessert; I flirt. All this heat hatches my face. I feel it, and I am happy, schoolgirl happy, with a man I am afraid to kiss.

I have done my share of kissing—so what am I afraid of? The teeth, their leafy transparency? His teeth remind me of my grandfather’s teeth, and the shock, up close, of all that metal inside his mouth.